1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to a method and an apparatus for data acquisition and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for displaying a sequence of questions, prompting answers to each of the questions, receiving the answers, and storing and analyzing the received answers.
2. Discussion
Many types of techniques are used to acquire and analyze consumer product data in order to ascertain overall consumer acceptance and opinion concerning various products.
Examples of these prior techniques include telephone surveys, as well as direct interview type surveys requiring an interviewer to put forth a series of questions to the interviewee and to record the solicited answers and thoughts, in a log book or journal. While these prior techniques have been useful, they suffer from many drawbacks.
Since these surveys require many interviewers, they have usually been found to be rather costly, inefficient, and incorrect, due to interviewer error. Additionally, the presence of an interviewer has been found to make an interviewee somewhat uneasy, thereby inhibiting the interviewee from giving a full and accurate response to the various questions and also inhibiting the generation of an unsolicited and extemporaneous interviewee response.